As an entrepreneur, product designer and product manager for people management and predictive analytics software, I have seen a number of problems related to creating useful products, and getting things done. I decided to keep track of some common scenarios. All views are mine. Not my employers'.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

In the book Clay Shirky says that people have a lot of free time. He also says that technology influences how they spend that free time. Although the book is about society in general, a lot of what he says will apply to workplace culture, behavior and change.

If you are involved in designing or deploying social media tools, this book will help you develop a good understanding of why things turn out that way they do in social media projects.

I tweeted about some things that caught my attention.Communal Value Vs Civic Value : Communal value is what the participants get out of collaborative work. Civic value is what society gets out of the collaborative work of certain people.

Designing to utilize cognitive surplus : There are a trillion hours a month of cognitive surplus is available for use. Today we have the technologies to take advantage of this cognitive surplus for civic value.

Here is Clay Shirky talking about Cognitive Surplus and how it is changing the world.